Re: new food for the contrib/ directory

On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Alexandre Dulaunoy wrote:

> Yes, I have read the faq. The 1.2 is not responding why the modified
> Berkeley-style BSD license was choosen. There is only a respond :"because
> is like that..."

You would have to ask the Regents of the University of California at
Berkeley, not us. You would also have to ask them for permission to
change the licensing for the parts of Posgres that they contributed;
since they own the copyright, nobody else, not even the Postgresql
project, can change the licensing.

It might be good to make this a bit more clear in the FAQ. As well, you
might wish to add some information in light of the following:

As a NetBSD developer, I'd like to point out that the experience of the
NetBSD project has been that having multiple licenses in a system is
very expensive and makes releases a nightmare, if you're really going
to do it "right." Just finding all of the licenses in the system is an
arduous and time-consuming job. People using Posgres in many commerical
situations will save real dollars if everything is under one license.

Note also that one of the big problems we experienced was with clause
three of BSD-style licenses (the attribution clause). If you change the
name in clause three, you have a different license, and you may have
problems. That was the biggest factor contributing to massive license
proliferation in the NetBSD tree. Personally, I think clause three is
best left out alltogether, though I doubt it's changable for files still
including Berkeley source.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs(at)cynic(dot)net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC